Friday Snippets and Soundbites

It's Friday! We hope your first week of November has gone well—and either way we intend to make it better with "Snippets and Soundbites." What's a better way to kick off the weekend than with random tales from this week's news that prove the world is a strange place?

Ready to see what weirdness we dug up this week? Let's go!

Mr. Clean doesn't make a clean getaway.

A Pennsylvania man was jailed this week after a strange crime: trying to steal $86 worth of body soap. The 38-year-old Erie, Pennsylvania man was charged with felony shoplifting after he stole 13 containers of soap from a Rite Aid store on Wednesday night. He failed to post his $5000 bond on charges of felony retail theft and receiving stolen property and was put in jail early Thursday morning. Police aren't sure why the man was stealing soap. . . or why he needed so much of it. Maybe he just liked the smell? Read all about it here.

Superheroes wouldn't do that. Or would they? 

When Halloween is over a weekend, there's always sure to be some interesting stories. This year, one of them comes to us from Connecticut. That's because police in Stamford had to break up a fight between Captain America, Spider-Man, and Poison Ivy in a parking garage on Sunday morning. When police arrived they found the man dressed as Captain America, presumedly for the holiday, beating the father of the man dressed as Spider-Man. Spider-Man then punched Captain America as police tried to break up the fight—and somewhere in the middle of it all, Spider-Man's girlfriend, dressed as Poison Ivy, got a punch in too. The two men were arrested on assault charges and the woman dressed as Poison Ivy was charged with breach of peace. Learn more about the superhero brawl here. And then, tell us who your favorite superhero is in the comments section!

How hard is it to find a palace?

This week we learned that a 16th century watercolor of King Henry VIII's "lost" palace will be auctioned off by Christie's next month. It's expected to go for up to $1.9 million. So why such a stir about a really old kind of faded painting? Well, it has to do with the fact that it's the only one of its kind and the palace it depicts no longer exists. Apparently, Henry VIII comissioned Nonsuch Palace to rival the one King Francois I of France had and to celebrate the birth of his first legitimate male heir. Construction began in the southeast part of Englan ind 1538 and took eight years to complete. The palace was built as a hunting lodge and called "Nonsuch" because supposedly no other palace could match its splendor. The palace was still incomplete when Henry died in 1547. It fell into disrepair in the 1680s and the countess who owned it at the time began demolishing it to sell off the materials in order to pay her debts. By 1690 the palace had vanished—and for almost 400 years historians could only guess at its appearance through written records and a few drawings. The ink, chalk, and watercolor painting Christie's is auctioning off is the only surviving representation of what the palace actually looked like. It was painted by Joris Hoefnagel in 1568 as a record of the most important buildings in Europe. To learn more about this story and see the painting, go here. To learn more about Nonsuch Palace, go here and here.

As always, if today's edition of "Snippets and Soundbites" isn't enough news of the weird for you, check out page 38 in this month's (and every month's) issue of ec.